@Tom Thanks for the info. I tried running your code, and saw that it created the five variables from sashelp.class in a work.want dataset, but stopped short of populating any observations. The SET statement, combined with the STOP statement in this way, does indeed make for an illustrative example of your point here. With the SET statement, the variables are created (the declarative part)--and with the DATA statement, these variables are put into a new dataset--but with the STOP statement in the way, the observations from the source dataset cannot be recorded into the new dataset (the executable part).
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